Giovanni Pascoli - Last Dream
Giovanni Pascoli
Last Dream
Translated from Italian by
GEOFFREY BROCK
$16.00
Bilingual Edition
134 pages
July 30, 2019
ISBN 9780999261354
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
GIOVANNI PASCOLI (1855-1912) was the greatest Italian poet writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, and he exerted an enormous influence on modern Italian poetry.
GEOFFREY BROCK is the author of Voices Bright Flags (The Waywiser Press, 2013), and Weighing Light (Ivan R. Dee, 2005). Geoffrey is the editor of The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry and the translator of numerous books of Italian poetry and prose. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.
Giovanni Pascoli
Last Dream
Translated from Italian by
GEOFFREY BROCK
Winner of the 2020 Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, an essential new translation of one of Italian literature’s most celebrated poets.
Giovanni Pascoli stands as a towering figure at the threshold of modern Italian poetry, yet he is little known in English. He wrote his best poems in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth, in an extraordinary burst that included his three most important collections, Myricae, Canti di Castelvecchio, and Primi poemetti. In this volume, translator Geoffrey Brock offers a personal anthology that conveys the wide-eyed spirit and formal beauty of the originals.
“This collection is a revelation. In Geoffrey Brock’s impeccable versions, Pascoli becomes a poet who demands to be read out loud. Time and again I found myself stopping to savor a phrase, a line break, a rhyme, a stanza. And then reading the poem over from the start. ‘The Sleep of Odysseus’ is heart-stopping. It’s difficult to overstate my admiration for that tact, grace, and formal imagination that shape these remarkable translations.” —Clare Cavanagh
“A champion of childlike intuition, muted tones, and ‘small things,’ Pascoli has until now been confined to his corner of the map. In this personal anthology, poet and translator Geoff Brock conveys to us the best of Pascoli. His Pascoli is the author of subtle, bewitching poems that look both inward and outward, celebrating the natural world and the inner life of humble objects: kites, walking sticks, the little nests of spring. Brock has kept the rhymes and meters, and his deeply intelligent remakings breathe new life into the old idiom.” —Will Schutt
“Brock has mastered the formula behind the magic of Pascoli’s poetry. [...] Indeed, to our modern ears used to free verse or to poetry deprived of any musical patterns, these poems sound positively, and pleasantly, old fashioned. The result is a truly remarkable achievement where the intricate imagery and the malleability of the English language at the expert hands of Brock provide the reader with translations that are poems in their own right.” —Elena Borelli, Reading in Translation
"For over a century, the haunting, humble, and uncanny poetry of Giovanni Pascoli has remained almost entirely inaccessible to readers of English, with just a small portion of his vast oeuvre available in translation. Geoffrey Brock’s stunning collection at last brings the joys of reading Pascoli’s best verses to a new audience, brilliantly capturing the 'shadow and the mystery' of Pascoli’s work. The intimate links that Pascoli forges between sound and meaning, his innovative syntactical constructions, and highly specific lexicon have often been cited as obstacles to rending his works in translation. Brock has met the challenge, bringing to life in English Pascoli’s evocative, hazy, tremulous poetic world with its melancholic tones and childlike sense of wonder. These moving translations, deeply attuned to Pascoli’s rhythms, reveal to English readers the suggestive power and fragility of the world he depicts: the 'quiet scrape of leaf on withered leaf,' the echoing of 'tired bells,' the 'grimly rumbling thunderclaps,' the 'bickering' of 'nearby sparrows,' and the wafting perfume of jasmine.” —Maria Trulio
BIOS
GIOVANNI PASCOLI (1855-1912) was the greatest Italian poet writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, and he exerted an enormous influence on modern Italian poetry.
GEOFFREY BROCK is the author of Voices Bright Flags (The Waywiser Press, 2013), and Weighing Light (Ivan R. Dee, 2005). Geoffrey is the editor of The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry and the translator of numerous books of Italian poetry and prose. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.
PRESS
Bilingual Edition
134 pages
July 30, 2019
ISBN 9780999261354
Distributed by Small Press Distribution (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
